Marxist Until Graduation

When I was at Sarah Lawrence I'm pretty there were as many MUGs as BUGs and LUGs (Bisexual Until Graduation and Lesbian Until Graduation).  

And all apparently interested in Katy Perry, these days:

via mental floss

Updates &tc.

New column up shortly at The Bollard. You can also hear it in my own dulcet voice on Lesbian Radio Thursday (tomorrow!) sometime between 1:30 and 3:00 pm EST. Stream it here.

Reporter query: looking for polyamorous heterosexuals. No, really.

Western Mass was great, although it turns out that I don't like Tibetan food and that my menstrual cycle hates me. Interesting circle, that.

Does anyone but me find the Landmark Forum thing creepy? I keep getting invitations from people and I kind of want to run away from anything that promises all of the answers to my problems.

Speaking of answers, it's time for the question of the day: how does one rebuild patience after it's all used up? Suggestions welcome. But be careful how you answer because, well, I don't have any and tact seems to be in low supply as well.

From the Couch: Desire Paths

That's right. Blogging from my couch. It's very exciting. In celebration of this momentous event, I give you the missing lesbian radio piece, Desire Paths.



My first years in Portland, I didn’t need a car. My feet--and the spotty public transportation system--carried me wherever I needed to go. For a time, I worked at the health food store, where the bus schedule was somewhere way past spotty, on the edge between cruel and ridiculous. So I walked. After dropping my daughter off at daycare in the East End and kissing my girlfriend goodbye, I walked the churchy stretch of Cumberland Avenue and down into the wind towards the bay. I walked, and walked.

The shortest route was down Franklin Arterial: two rushing double lanes bordered by green knolls, and a wide median planted with more grass and trees. Though the stretch from Cumberland Avenue to Marginal Way is perhaps half a mile, it seemed three times as far. Franklin Art connects the interstate to the Old Port just as efficiently as it divides the Bayside neighborhood. Its indifferent traffic and lack of sidewalks is hardly on a human scale.

Walking Franklin Arterial is a lesson in humility. In summer, you walk on a dusty path in the trodden grass on the side of the road. The wind from the passing cars drives gravel into your legs, and there is no respite from the exhaust fumes in the steady traffic. People speed by, your head bows into the heat. You can’t help but imagine the effect of a ton or two of fast-moving metal on the human body. Your body. The dust and chemicals taste like apocalypse.

One day I noticed a path that slanted through a gap in a fence, across the banks of dusty grass, through the median, across the other side, up the other bank, and between the bent links of a chain fence. The path was a brown track made by feet back and forth between the housing development on one side and the downtown on the other. It ignored sidewalks, roadways, and the square lines of a city block, moving directly between two places where people need to go. On its own terms. It inexplicably cheered me as I walked every day, home to work, work to home. In the winter the path beat down the snow into frozen footsteps and fearlessly crossed the icy asphalt. In spring, the grass sprang green around the mud churned up by busy feet. I never actually saw anybody using it, but clearly people did, and do. Lots of them.

City planners and other neighborhood developers call these desire paths, because they reflect a pedestrian wish—to get straight from the housing development to the downtown, for example. Pedestrians like to walk in straight lines, and they like to take as few steps as possible. This desire path on Franklin Arterial is the imaginary extension of Oxford Street. In a recent article in the Portland Phoenix, a resident who lives near this particular desire path on Franklin Arterial wondered why people don’t walk the five hundred feet up to the sidewalk to cross at the intersection where there are crosswalks.

But why should they? If you can walk straight across, why go out of your way? Because someone has laid concrete down at a right angle to other roads? Here, I felt, was a truth: mostly we walk on the paths that are laid out for us, but sometimes we make our own way, because it’s faster, or shorter, or because the grocery bags are so heavy in our hands that we cannot afford to go one single step out of our way.

It happens that way: rules and expectations are laid out for us. They are the paved streets and sidewalks. Usually they go where we wanted to go anyway: work at a job, get a paycheck; use your blinker, avoid an accident. Or take a road ten miles up, turn left at the old fire station, and drive all the way to the end to watch the sun come up over Casco Bay.

But sometimes the roads don’t go where we’d be going. Sometimes the path takes an inexplicable curve that would take us fifteen steps out of our way. Or fifty. Sometimes a road is severed to make room for a busier one, and sometimes neighborhoods are divided by wide strips of tar and traffic moving far faster than any person can run, the interests of one group trumping those of another.

And sometimes laws cut across our lives because other people aren’t thinking about what it will do to us, or worse--if they are thinking about it, they don’t care. Sometimes the looks of strangers clutter the way into my daughter’s school, so I drop your partner’s hand and look down. Sometimes a preacher will spill hatred in the guise of teaching morality. Sometimes we are told who it’s okay for us to love, and who it’s not, or who can wear dresses, or who should but doesn’t.

These are the streets we’re meant to follow, and maybe those streets go where most people were going anyway; that’s why us queers are a minority, after all. But some people break paths in defiance of the right angles and concrete. They dart across the dangerous pavement, dodging hatred and ignorance, big suckers than can squish a body flat with the shape of a curled lip or a raised fist. Steady feet follow each other through the mud and beat down the snow and make a path that should, by all logic, be there anyway. We slip through the links in chained fences and sometimes we even show up at meetings to demand why the road stops in such a dumbass place anyway.

It cheers me, as I trudge along the side of a dirty road, to see the paths that people are making in defiance of the planners and developers. I think that sometimes those planners forget the size of the human body, forget the needs of people who live in them, and the way that lives don’t fit into right angles. Remind them. Even if you don’t make it to the meetings, show them the way with your feet, your body, your actions. Follow your own desire path, and make new ones, and show them where the roads should have been going all along.

And The Good Word Is

It looks like I'm going to be a regular sidekick (I think that I prefer "faithful companion" or "communication partner," but the terminology is still under negotiation) on Lesbian Radio.

Yep, Virginia and me, having public conversations about queerness and feminism. Hopefully I don't get so anxious my head actually does fall off, because that's what it feels like is going to happen every time I go on the air. And it would be wicked inconvenient if it actually did.

Looks like it'll be the first and third Wednesday for now. And the show for 12/6 looks like a whoppah--prob'ly about holiday gifts: Are they a good idea? Is there any way to do it meaningfully? Is there a limit on the number of Nomia gift certificates you can buy for your friends and family? All that and more.

I wonder if I'll be able to resist talking in a Maine accent on the air. I wonder if it matters.

By Popular Demand

Here's my piece from lesbian radio.  Two weeks ago.

 

Sorry.

 

 

 

I have been out as a lesbian for most of my daughter's life.  In fact, I don't believe that she remembers the time before I came out.    But for most of the six years since then, I have identified first as a single mom and then as a lesbian.  Raising a child alone has shaped every facet of my existence: what jobs I can take, because they have to be during daycare hours; what my social life is like, because good evening childcare is expensive and hard to find; what I eat, because care of a growing body is time-consuming; and most of all, who I date, because it is rare to find a person who genuinely likes children and who doesn't mind dates that will probably consist of a rented movie, and could be interrupted at any time by nightmares, illness, or temper tantrums.  

But mostly, I think it's me that's been difficult.   Here's the thing: when you're a single parent it's almost impossible to be fun and to get things done.  It comes at the expense of my sense of humor—because who has time to laugh when there are Things I Could Be Doing Instead.   I found that in the wake of the endless rounds of work, supper, cleaning, laundry, soccer games and girl scout meetings, taking out the trash, changing the oil in the car, disciplinary conversations, all with the inevitable deadline of bedtime looming, my sense of silliness—and sometimes my sense of self—got buried, only to appear at those rare times when the bills were paid and everybody washed and fed.  

I have survived single-parent-dom by planning far ahead, anticipating potential problems, and being prepared for anything.  I always carried snacks and toys in my pockets in case of a cranky kid (and finding them during my infrequent nights out was a guaranteed way to keep me from feeling attractive, since old apples and hairy gummy snacks tend to be the opposite of sexy).   Meals were planned a week in advance.  I cleaned furiously, because I figured that if the cleaning got behind, I would never have time to catch up.   And I spent any free time trying to figure out how to squeeze more in. 

Truly, it was a little scary.  I recently found a schedule that I made for myself on graph paper early in my undergraduate years.   The days were vertical strips, and the hours were on the horizontal lines.  Every single hour of every day was marked with different colors for different activities—red for work from eight to five, yellow for commuting and daycare pickups from five to six, blue for the time from six to eight designated for supper, baths, and reading time, and purple for homework from eight to twelve.   I also somehow went to class three nights a week while my parents watched my daughter.  I don't even remember that semester.  

For the past ten years, it's as if I have been afraid to stop, for fear that I would not be able to start again.    I didn't have time to stop.  Needless to say, it has not always been good.   My goal—that my daughter and I be a happy, functioning family—was not met.  We functioned, but nobody could say that we were happy.  I was grim and stressed out, and my daughter petulant and clingy because all too often, and ironically, she got lost in the shuffle.

This is not to say that single-parent families can't work.  But being a parent is a full time job all by itself—one with no days off or health insurance—and most of us still need to work at other full-time jobs for money.   I don't believe that the nuclear family model is the perfect one, but I also don't believe that anyone should ever be wholly responsible for the life of a child all alone.  

Anyway, this year, I got very lucky and met someone who saw through my manic planning, someone who is queer and who loves my daughter; who is not afraid of the implications of getting involved in our lives and who is an amazing person whom I love very much.   We moved in together earlier this fall, and the experience has been both easier and more difficult than I expected. The relationship happened at the same time as I drastically reduced my work hours, and all of these changes have been nothing less than a revelation.  

My daughter loves my partner, and with the attention of two adults, she is blossoming.   And I am re-learning how to live.  For the first time in ten years, I am able to actually begin to relax.  And most beautifully, the shared responsibility happens out of my partner's genuine generosity and caring spirit.   This is our family, and it is amazing to me.

However, my single-parent coping mechanisms are hard to let go of, and have caused a few conflicts.   Like when I start getting anxious about Wednesday's dinner on Monday morning because Wednesdays are girl scout night and it's such a big rush to get home so we'll have to plan something quick but it should be nutritious because my daughter gets cranky if she gets too much sugar and I don't want her to behave badly in front of those troop leaders.   Or when I burst into tears over the unwashed dishes because I'm still thinking that I'll never have time to do them before it's time to start cooking dinner again tomorrow.   Someone once told me that people who seem insane are sometimes having a perfectly sane reaction to a crazy situation.  Changing that crazy situation to one in which I am supported and loved has made me realize that, while objectively completely freaky, my single mom habits served their purpose and now can be left behind, gone the way of four-coffee mornings and that control-freak schedule.   I can finally slow down, and sometimes stop, knowing that I will have the energy to get up again, because I am rested.

I want to be present for my daughter and my partner, enjoying the time when we are together.   And if I ever am a single mom again, I will order more pizza and serve more mac and cheese and not sweat so much if the house is messy or if we miss soccer practice.  The dishes can wait, the night will roll on, and we'll figure it out, together.

On the Lesbian... Radio

It's that day again. 

 

As a friend said to me earilier, I'll be "all lesbo famous" on the radio.  1pm on WMPG, 90.9 and 104.1. 

 

I'll post the text of my piece here tomorrow.

Lesbian Radio Redux

[This is the piece I read on Lesbian Radio yesterday. It went well, even the chatting. But it still terrifies me enough that I felt shaky the whole rest of the day.]

Skirting the Issue

“You should wear a skirt more often,” my lover whispered a week ago, sliding her hand up my bare thigh. I want to, when she speaks to me like this, and she does every time I wear one. We were in the kitchen, preparing for our separate daily work when her appreciation for my attire took precedence over coffee and toast. I had a meeting later at my office job, which had prompted the skirt in the first place, but this was a lovely side benefit. I put down my mug of coffee and allowed myself to be distracted, feeling beautiful.

Later, as I carried the mail between the post office and my work, noticing how the late-summer breeze held an undertone of fall, a car approached me and slowed. I knew what was coming, even before the call floated out the open window: “Hey baby, you got some of that for me?” and the car passed down the street. My legs felt suddenly exposed, and I wished for thick jeans to cover them. I walk this street every day, every season, but wearing as skirt will almost always bring comments about my body from strangers.

Ah, the skirt. Weird symbol of the feminine, enforcer of crossed legs. Open to the ground and to the breeze, accentuating my vulnerability, my sensuality, my femaleness. Catcher of wind and symbol of my gender. Binding and airy, sweet and threatening: I have had to make my peace with this particular article of clothing, and it has involved my deepest conceptions of myself and my world.

For many years, the kind of person I imagined when I thought of “lesbian” is now what I would consider butch—like my lovers, like many of my friends. Generally short-haired, often broad-shouldered and big boned, sometimes slim and boyish, these women are as awkward in dresses as most men. They are the ones my baby-dyke self would notice excitedly in the grocery store or walking down the street. I would nudge my best friend during those coming-out years—a slight blonde boy who was the only other queer person I actually knew—and whisper, “is she?” “Definitely,” he would answer. “Family.” And we would somehow feel bolstered by this sighting, proof that were not alone in our Central Maine town, that there were others out there who were like us.

Made visibly queer by their gender transgression, butch women became my icon of lesbianism. Thus, when I finally decided to be out, my hair came off and my wardrobe settled into a very comfortable dyke-chic: baggy jeans or dockers, button up men’s shirts or t-shirts, boots. The dresses and fancy shoes went in a big bag to Goodwill, the makeup and razors into the trash can. I wanted people to know, when they looked at me, who I was, who I loved, and what I stood for.

But as I learned about the distinctions between gender and sexuality, and became more comfortable in my sexual orientation, I began to collect skirts and dresses once more, at first hauling them out for special occasions and then for almost regular days, like the one last week. I have begun to understand a more fluid sense of my own identity that blends and crosses traditional boundaries. The armpit and leg hair stays but the baggy dockers go; the high heels will never return but the lipstick does, for dates and job interviews. I appreciate the feeling of air and freedom a skirt gives me, and I enjoy feeling pretty—to myself and to my lover.

Still, often, dressing femme—or at least femm-er—makes me uneasy. The skirts and dresses that hang mostly unused in my closet have become heavily fraught symbols of my identity and desire. Many times, wearing more traditional women’s clothing, and especially when my daughter is with me, I unintentionally pass. Since my wardrobe has shifted towards more feminine clothing, I have to come out a lot more frequently; people often unknowingly refer to a boyfriend for me, and I have to state what used to be much more obvious: I am a big old dyke, and there is not, nor is there likely to be, a boyfriend. Probably. And I can forget how it feels to walk visibly queerly through public space—that funny ripple of attention that sometimes trails you like a canoe wake—though when I hold hands with my lover I am quickly reminded.

The kind of attention I get wearing dresses is sometimes unwelcome—like the guy in the car. Sometimes it reminds me of how gender norms are enforced by social practice, as when I waitressed a few years ago and my tips were consistently higher if I wore a skirt to work. Putting on a dress means putting on a whole way of being in the world. It affects how I feel, how others see me, what kind of space I occupy, and what power I appear to have.
Likewise, I find myself dressing in a more masculine way when I am feeling especially vulnerable—like the day after a man in a passing car comments about my body—and I have to remind myself that equating masculine clothes with qualities like strength and safety is the worst kind of essentialism.

Clothing is often shorthand for the various categories we all occupy; it’s a quick way to sort out people and their affinities. Our clothes do often serve as our armor, our exoskeleton. But people are more complicated than their clothing, more flexible, more hodge-podge. Less like cotton or silk and more like the layers of light reflected off water. More like the way skin stretches seamlessly over muscle and bone.

What I would like for myself and for my daughter—for all people—is a world in which any person can dress in the way that makes them feel comfortable, regardless of the body they were born with; where anyone can enjoy the cool softness of their legs together under a skirt without fear of violence or assumptions about who they love. For now, the best I can do is to challenge what I know of gender essentialism, to embody that paradox with heart, and to proudly wear my queer skirt on my hairy legs, with my lover’s hand planted firmly on my bare thigh.

Lesbian Radio

Tomorrow is Lesbian Radio Day. I'm working on a lovely piece about skirts.

Which is way more interesting than it sounds.

The show is from 1-1:3o on WMPG 90.1. You can stream it here.